Internet delivery of digital content to IPTVs continues to increase, giving rise to an equally challenging issue of content navigation and management. Because of the IPTV's unique situation of being a shared device that is controlled by a simple input device, it is difficult to find an ingenious solution that will resolve this issue without excessively raising hardware costs, especially for disparate users. It is impractical to make a remote controller for all possible functions, because the same will significantly increase costs. It is also difficult to navigate around a large IPTV screen, searching for content, without disturbing the viewing experience of other users. Consequently, issues of cumbersome data entry, limitations in memory and processing power, difficulties in effective content searches and the traditional, but limited, one-to-one interaction with the IPTV remain as major obstacles.
In addition, the current IPTV experience is one of uniformity in terms of functionality and looks. This consistency is good across devices so that a single user does not have to adapt to different user interface (UI) experiences for different devices. However, the same does not provide significant variety for a user.